With four busted reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi site, engineers and rescue workers have plenty to do just to keep all their plates spinning. But over the past few days, there always seems to be one reactor causing them more headaches than others. Yesterday it was reactor 4, with its coolant pool empty of water and the spent fuel rods …
Disasters
What’s the Cost of Shifting Away from Nuclear Power?
The news from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan just keeps getting worse. Energy Secretary Steven Chu said that at least a “partial meltdown” seemed to be happening, and today the U.S. government advised its citizens to stay at least 50 miles away from the Fukushima plant. The worst-case scenario—a release of a large amount …
From Bad to Worse: Are the Problems at the Fukushima Nuclear Plant Spiralling Out of Control?
Update 3/16/11 3:03 PM: The news doesn’t get better. At an afternoon Congressional hearing, Nuclear Regulatory Commission chairman Gregory Jaczko said that the all the water in the spent fuel pod in the number 4 reactor at Fukushima Daiichi has almost certainly boiled away:
We believe that radiation levels are extremely high, which
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Butterfly Wings and Nuclear Disasters
The news keeps getting worse at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, with the AP now reporting that the fuel rods in all three of the stricken facility’s reactors are experiencing partial meltdown. In one of the reactors, the level of cooling water has fallen effectively to zero, leaving the fuel rods fully …
Japan: The Disaster Gap and the Price of Power
I’ve been traveling and reporting for the past few days, out of email and cell phone most of the time, so I haven’t been able to blog on the terrible Japan quake and ongoing nuclear disaster. I know little of what’s going on, though an explosion just occurred at the Fukushima Daiichi 3 reactor. I’m thinking about the country I lived …
Japan’s Radiation Exposure: How Serious Is It?
There are few environmental dangers that spook people more than radioactivity. And there is surely no country in the world that comes by that fear more rightly than Japan — which, alone among nations, has felt the pain of a nuclear conflagration first hand. So it’s understandable that the Japanese public is terrified by the danger …
Nuke Plant Crisis Worsens as Radiation Levels Rise
[UPDATE: 5:59 PM ET: The evacuation zone around the power plant has been increased to 10 km, or 6.2 mi.]
[UPDATE: 5:46 PM EST: Japanese authorities announced that radiation inside the stricken Fukushima power plant control room has risen to 1,000 times its normal level. Some has leaked outside of the plant, prompting calls for …
The Russian Heat Wave Wasn’t Exactly Due to Climate Change—But That’s Not the Point
Climate modeling is the inverse of weather prediction. The further away from the present a weather event is going to occur, the harder it usually is for meterologists to predict—as anyone who has ever tried to rely on a 10-day extended forecast should know. But in climate change, modelers can have meaningful confidence in how increased …
Bangladesh Climate Migration Happening — Now
I’m in Dhaka this week, where I have been doing some work between my long hours becoming intimate with the Bangladeshi capital’s epic traffic. The traffic here — an unholy tangle of rickshaws, auto-rickshaws, buses, trucks, cars and motorbikes — puts everything I have seen in Jakarta, India, Bangkok and Los Angeles (please!) to …
Australia’s Cyclone: Climate Change, or Just Really Bad Weather?
The cyclone that thrashed a still-soggy Queensland yesterday has re-energized an ongoing debate Down Under over what Australia can expect from a warmer planet and what the nation – the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide per capita – should do about it.
Front and center in the fray is Ross Garnaut, the government’s …